My Baby Loves Halloween


Book Description




Blue-Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love


Book Description

Most Americans assume that shared genes or blood relationships provide the strongest basis for family. What can adoption tell us about this widespread belief and American kinship in general? Blue-Ribbon Babies and Labors of Love examines the ways class, gender, and race shape public and private adoption in the United States. Christine Ward Gailey analyzes the controversies surrounding international, public, and transracial adoption, and how the political and economic dynamics that shape adoption policies and practices affect the lives of people in the adoption nexus: adopters, adoptees, birth parents, and agents within and across borders. Interviews with white and African-American adopters, adoption social workers, and adoption lawyers, combined with her long-term participant-observation in adoptive communities, inform her analysis of how adopters' beliefs parallel or diverge from the dominant assumptions about kinship and family. Gailey demonstrates that the ways adoptive parents speak about their children vary across hierarchies of race, class, and gender. She shows that adopters' notions about their children's backgrounds and early experiences, as well as their own "family values," influence child rearing practices. Her extensive interviews with 131 adopters reveal profoundly different practices of kinship in the United States today. Moving beyond the ideology of "blood is thicker than water," Gailey presents a new way of viewing kinship and family formation, suitable to times of rapid social and cultural change.




Longing for Normal, 9-12 family contemporary


Book Description

A boy unites an immigrant community and rebuilds his family–using a simple sourdough bread recipe. Eliot Winston, a grieving son, must convince his new step-mother – now Griff Winston’s widow – to adopt him. But when she married Griff Winston, Marj hadn’t bargained on being the single mother of a twelve-year-old boy. Alli Flynn, a foster child new to the school, convinces Eliot that he must fight to keep his family intact and the best way to do that is to help Mrs. Winston with the Bread Project, a fund raising project for the school. With his whole future at stake, Eliot tries hard to please Marj; but as the deadlines near for the Bread Project and for Marj to sign his adoption papers, Eliot finds it harder and harder to hang on to hope. In the tradition of Dicey’s Song by Cynthia Voigt, this story follows two kids who search for a family and a home.




Reading with Babies, Toddlers and Twos


Book Description

It's never too early—or too late—to start sharing books with your baby! Reading is one of the first activities you can enjoy with your child, and Reading with Babies, Toddlers, and Twos gets you started. Instill a love for reading early by answering questions such as: Which books will a newborn baby enjoy? ?What do you buy after you've read Goodnight Moon? ?Are eBooks and apps appropriate for young children? Can I make up a story to tell my child? What are the best collections of fairy tales, fables, and other classic stories? A parenting resource to help with early learning and literacy, Straub, Dell'Antonia, and Payne use their decades of experience as parents, book reviewers, and children's librarians to bring you the very best in children's books, so you'll never run out of ideas for reading with your baby. "An accessible and enjoyable guide...this book is a 'go-to' resource."—Traci Lester, executive director, Reach Out and Read of Greater New York




Where I Come From


Book Description

In this irresistible collection of wide-ranging and endearingly personal columns culled from his best-loved pieces in Southern Living and Garden & Gun, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Rick Bragg muses on everything from his love of Tupperware to the decline of country music; from the legacy of Harper Lee to the metamorphosis of the pickup truck; and from the best way to kill fire ants to why any self-respecting Southern man worth his salt should carry a good knife. An ode to the stories and the history of the South, crackling with tenderness, wit, and deep affection, Where I Come From celebrates “a litany of great talkers, blue-green waters, deep casseroles, kitchen-sink permanents, lying fishermen, haunted mansions, and dogs that never die, things that make this place more than a dotted line on a map or a long-ago failed rebellion, even if only in some cold-weather dream.” Evoking the beauty and the odd particularity of humble origins, Bragg's searching vision, generous humor, and richly nuanced voice bring a place, a people, and a world vividly to life.




A Diary to My Babies


Book Description

A six-year journey: six losses and three beautiful angels. After losing her son Jude in August 2020, a spark was ignited in Carmen Grover as she read through every diary that she kept for each of her babies. Rather than have them remain stacked under her bed, Carmen decided that her journals would make a difference. The result has been an honest and poignant compilation of the ups and downs of Carmen' s experience with pregnancy loss, from rolling in the grass and convulsing on the kitchen floor in her cycle of grief, to seeing the strength she could gain in the signs and special moments all around her. A Diary to My Babies: Journeying Through Pregnancy Loss shines a light on the darkness of pregnancy loss, while also showing there is no right way to grieve. And through her incredible journey, Carmen hopes the story of her family and her babies just might help others to heal.




Good Ole Rotten Apples


Book Description

Judy Frankamp discovered that being raised in a “religious” home was not enough. It was only when Jesus her Saviour became the Lord of her life, she truly understood what it meant to be born again. Then she could not help but be honest and confront those around her. She takes us into specific issues that have bothered many Christians, but they could not quite get a handle on them. Frankamp knows how to put them into words. With an engaging, homey style, the author explains how she learned that her favorite “Christian” talk show host was really pushing the New Age. She puts into plain language what is wrong with Harry Potter. She describes her confrontation with liberal pastors who didn’t care if their Bible had removed or changed the words of God. They just didn’t want to make waves. On several occasions, she writes from the point of view of Satan and his devils, scheming how to derail Christians. There are some things, like the Harry Potter craze, that we just “know” aren’t right, but can’t explain it. After reading Frankamp’s story, you’ll know how.




The Creative Life


Book Description

A passionate and inspiring guide to creating a life built around the creative process. This groundbreaking new work from the bestselling author of The Artist's Way, guides readers in creating a vision for their lives in which art and life are inextricably linked. According to Julia Cameron, when we allow our creative spirit to serve as our compass, we discover that the art we have always longed to create is suddenly within our grasp. In The Creative Life, Cameron shows readers how to use their creative hearts and minds to cultivate lives that nourish and sustain their art. Through beautifully drawn scenes from her own life, as well as the lives of the many artists around her, Cameron reveals that creativity flourishes during the quiet pauses in our lives-and that it is only when we allow ourselves to slow down and savor life that we discover ways to depict it sensitively and poetically in our art. By opening the curtain on her own life and the lives of the artists who surround her, Cameron reveals a world rich with creative possibility.




Good-Vs-Evil


Book Description

God is there to save you from harm. The devil can’t take no more then you can’t ever have in life on what you can have is yours in life who stands by the great waterfalls of life stands for ups and downs everything is meant for a reason because you wonder why your life is so block from others because something maybe missing in order to put common sense together which was unsaid and done that needs to be done. so you cherish the memory of that day of your life every stone you can ever take and every breath in your body, give it to god and glory and take a deep breath and praise God. Trials must be mistaken because whatever you do or whatever you did, it must be something or what you did needs to be fixed and prepared of a dislike compare to or a distance. A distance is a challenge, of course, or a state of mind. What people do for a living is the unit of life. It’s the bad things that you do that makes trials go wrong and bad rather then right. One way it is or another, and one way it doesn’t. What you do or what you don’t do, you pick up the pieces of the puzzles and get it right on time, on the dot and line, and you take a piece of the pie—what you like and dislike and show and prove the way you want it. You talk about the good old times, and sometimes, it’s about the wrong times of your life and the things you did in the past, whether it be good or bad in your wildest dream life. You take that and swipe your shoulders off. The greater it is, the badder it maybe. It can be fixable that same day or a couple of days a head. Trouble don’t last always and not for long. That’s how it works and what should be done, and you take it and fix everything that has been broken. You stand forward to that and be strong and have strength, and whatever that needs to be done and whatever that it is you can’t do, you don’t have to do it or put up with it. Be yourself and do all that you can do as possible, and that’s all you can do. You cannot please everyone because it’s gonna have a passing moment when you can do something or not and you will be tired of it. It also includes fatal attraction, breaking relationships, tragedies, boo thangs, lover and friends, blessings, curses, magic spells, cast of spells, Buddhism, voodoo, and many more.




The Journey for Mama's Babies


Book Description

Melissa Pandolf has never been one to let a few rules stand in her way. So when she and her husband, Doug, began the adoption process, the hopeful mother-to-be had her sights set on quickly welcoming two beaming babies to make the Pandolf house a family home. However, after three years; four trips to Russia; one trip to Washington, DC; and two plane crashes that threatened to bring their dream down around them, she came to realize that a bigger destiny awaited them on the other side of the world. As the adoptive parents of four Russian siblings, the young couple from Long Island learned the true meaning of family, and what it means to go the extra mile to give your children what they need. Beginning with the first meeting with an adoption agency, The Journey for Mama's Babies chronicles the Pandolfs' three-year odyssey to bring their babies home. From her naïve initial assumptions about the process to her ultimate hard-won savvy and resolve, Pandolf shares every key aspect of the experience, including the unexpected depression that can be companion to this emotionally wrenching process. With clear-eyed candor, the author recounts the ups and downs, the unexpected twists, and the backward loops that frequently punctuated their mission. Along the way, she and her husband were also faced with heartbreaking decisions that neither had anticipated, as their dream of two children quickly grew when a larger group of siblings presented itself. At the same time, the couple also confronted the demand for an ironclad resiliency due to countless setbacks, never-ending red tape, and a constantly shifting perspective on what it truly means to be a family. Still, their challenges only began when they finally were joined together in the United States, as the Pandolfs scrambled to help their children make the transition from speaking Russian to speaking English and help them adjust to their new surroundings. Enlightening, easy to read, and arrestingly honest, The Journey for Mama's Babies will captivate anyone who has ever navigated the intricacies of the adoption process or who cares about someone who has. Both inspiring and open-eyed, this tender, telling story of a family built across oceans, languages, and every imaginable obstacle will take hold of your heart, and make you hold your loved ones closer still.